Humans of Leamington Spa

For our behaviour change project ‘Humans of Leamington Spa’, we wanted to raise awareness about homelessness. In particular, we wanted to stress the variety of reasons that can lead to homeless and show how those unfortunate events could happen to YOU.

It only takes a cascade of unfortunate events such as domestic abuse, debt, disability and poor health to lead to loosing one’s home and consequently having nowhere to turn.

Attitudes towards the homeless often lead to discriminating them as the ‘outgroup’. Therefore, subsequent prejudice and negative attitudes towards them lead to stigmatisation. What is forgotten is that these people have often had a tough battle with bereavement, abuse and drug addictions. All of which require a tough mental and physical battle on a daily basis. These people are no different to you or I. They have feelings, goals and aspirations and shouldn’t be shunned from society.

To put into perspective how ubiquitous homelessness is, statistics from the Salvation Army reveal that 35% of homelessness is due to job loss, 15% due to high bills and low wages, 10% due to poor health, sickness and disability.

Firstly, we got in contact with the Salvation Army in Leamington Spa and started volunteering weekly at the homeless drop-ins. This was to establish a relationship with those living on the streets, as well as to investigate the opportunities available to help and support them. These relationships encouraged the people in the drop-in centre to confide in us, and discuss personal details about their lives, and how they came to be homeless. It is unlikely that they would have felt willing to disclose this information without a prior relationship, so we feel our time there was extremely worthwhile, both for us (in the context of the project), and also for them, as when homeless it can feel as though no one is interested in you. This can have a detrimental effect on your own self-esteem, self-worth and self-respect.  

We decided the most powerful tool for changing attitudes would be a video using images, statistics, music and testimonies. We knew that a video would be a powerful tool because we could circulate it via social media, which has the capacity to reach groups of people we don’t directly know, therefore has more chance to change attitudes.

In our video we emphasised the contrast between living in ‘North’ Leamington, the wealthier part represented by consumer culture against the isolated, forgotten spaces where homeless people seek refuge.

Our main message was ‘this could happen to YOU’. We used the persuasive technique of repetition and hyperbole to emphasise that no one is protected from certain life events that may lead to homelessness. We also wanted to shatter the illusion that all homeless people are the same, and homeless purely because of decisions like drug use, or gambling. No one chooses to live on the street. The repetition of “YOU” is an example of the self-referencing effect, whereby encode information better if it is relevant to the self. These techniques also tie in with the testimonials, which convey the parallels between the past lives of the homeless, and the current lives of those watching the videos. For example, one interviewee discusses how she had a husband and a large house, which she eventually lost. This may hit home to the viewers, as it gives them something to relate to.

 Laura Harris

Lauren Haynes

Emily Collins

References

Braverman, J. (2008). Testimonials versus informational persuasive messages: The moderating effect of delivery mode and personal involvement. Communication Research, 35(5), 666-694.

Cialdini, R. B. (2009). Influence: Science and practice. Boston: Pearson Education, Inc.

Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1979). Effects of message repetition and position on cognitive response, recall, and persuasion. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 97-109.

The Salvation Army. (n.d.). Retrieved March 12, 2017, from https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/

Humans of Leamington Spa

The problem

Homelessness is on the rise in the UK and social stigma is not helping.

With 3,569 people sleeping rough each night in England (The Salvation Army, 2017) and twice the number of young people between 18-24 years old sleeping in the streets of London since 2009 (Comic Relief, 2017), we knew we wanted to change society’s attitude towards this issue.

Indeed, society currently has a tendency to alienate, stigmatise and blame homeless people for their situation instead of considering economic and social factors that can lead to a quick slip into homelessness (Belcher & DeForge, 2012).  Stigmatisation has two main damaging effects. Firstly, society treats itself as the in-group and those who are homeless as an outgroup (Becker, 1963). According to the Social Identity Theory (Tajfel, 1981) people prefer and help those who they feel are similar to them while maximising the difference with those considered outsiders. This tendency has alarming consequences, indeed Corrigan, & Wassel (2008) found that those who are stigmatised are aware of it and thus are likely to internalise it which contributes to drug and alcohol struggles (Room, 2005).

Belcher et al. (2012) proposed that the best way to break the cycle is by breaking the stigma. The good news is people want to help (Link et al., 1995).

Our solution

Through our behaviour change project, we focused on breaking these barriers: we hypothesised that making homeless people more relatable and introducing them as part of the in-group would encourage society to help them. Additionally, we ensured our video would give people the means to safely and frequently help those who are homeless, starting with a simple acknowledgement, “hello!”, to a donation towards the Salvation Army.

Steps 1, 2 and 3…

The first step our group took was contacting the Salvation Army in Leamington Spa to hear their ideas and thoughts on our project. Following the Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland, 1953), it was clear an authoritative and credible source was key to a persuasive message. After scheduling meetings with managers at the Salvation Army it was agreed that we would volunteer weekly at the drop in sessions and after gaining the trust of those using the Salvation Army’s services, we would conduct short informal interviews. The interviews with Shushi and Mel were purposely kept relaxed and informal in order to capture a real picture of the parts of their lives they were willing to share. Having real testimonies was another source of authority in our project. In fact, research showed that contact with homeless people increased people’s sympathy towards them (Farrell, & Link, 2004).

 In parallel, we had several filming days where we walked around Leamington Spa filming clips representing the wealthy consumer culture and contrasting them to the more isolated places in which homeless people seek refuge. We put together a powerful and informative video combining images, statistics, a voiceover and music.

Our clear message

The Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland, 1953) emphasises the importance of a strong message in order to increase persuasiveness. Therefore, our message was clear: “This could happen to You”. We emphasised this using repetition throughout the video. All elements in our video were directed towards one underlying message: homeless people are not so different from you. They do their laundry, have families, experience loneliness, live on the same street: they are “Humans of Leamington Spa”.

Our targeted audience

Lastly, as part of The Yale Attitude Change Approach (Hovland, 1953) we tailored our message to a specific audience in mind: students, in particular students living in Leamington Spa. Indeed, our title “Humans of Leamington Spa” would have more effect on them. Additionally, we hypothesised that those students would recognise the places shown in the video and thus feel more positively about the project. Our audience was easily reachable through the University’s numerous Facebook groups, we proceeded to share our video on the different pages dedicated to halls, degrees, Freshers, etc. The way we spread and shared our video was based on social loafing. Indeed, Weaver et al. (2007) found that a message heard several times was perceived as a more popular opinion, therefore we ensured that students would view the video message through multiple channels.

Our strategic format

We choose to create a video for our project such that we could share it on social media and our targeted audience could interact with it, leveraging two behaviour change techniques: consistency and foot-in-the-door technique. Indeed, once finalised, our video was shared over Facebook alongside the various captions “please watch, like and share”, “help us break stigmas by liking”, “want to help us break the stigma? Like this video!” etc. Firstly, according to the foot-in-the-door technique, people are more likely to accept a bigger request if they previously accepted to do a smaller one (Freedman & Fraser, 1966). In this context, first liking our video would be the smaller request and we hope that in the near future, people will start saying a quick “hello!” to the homeless they encounter and that this would quickly escalate to buying the big issue and donating to the Salvation Army. Indeed, according to Bem’s Self-perception Theory of Attitudes (1972) people seek to be consistent across their attitudes and behaviours, therefore having supported the homeless on Facebook, people would be more likely to commit to doing it on the streets.

Our measurable impact

Our video was shared more than 15 times on Facebook. It reached 200 views and accumulated over 40 likes. We are confident that our project will have an immediate impact on people’s behaviour, indeed while students are more reluctant to donate money, starting by acknowledging the presence of the homeless with a simple “hello!” could quickly escalate to sharing a coffee, buying the big issue and donating to the Salvation Army.

Alexandra de Buchet

 References

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Becker, H. S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the sociology of deviance London, , England: Free Press.

Belcher, J. R., & DeForge, B. R. (2012). Social stigma and homelessness: The limits of social change. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 22(8), 929-946.

Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. Advances in experimental social psychology, 6, 1-62.

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Comic Relief, (2017). Redout: Raise the Alarm,  Retrieved at:
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The Salvation Army. (2017). An appeal to those who visit, work, and live in Royal Leamington Spa. https://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/

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Are You a Rational Consumer? – The “Be a Rational Consumer” Campaign

Amy Wan; Katie Zhou; Jessica Li

Our starting point

Among the fields of behavioural science and social psychology, there is a variety of knowledge and research that can be used as persuasive techniques to change people’s behaviour and attitudes. For example, cases have shown these techniques are exceptional at promoting energy saving (Ayres, Raseman & Shih, 2013; Schultz et al., 2007). However, these techniques have been exploited far more frequently by marketers to make money. In the highly developed contemporary marketplace, we are exposed to huge amounts of choices and temptations. Among which, are the hidden marketing traps, making you spend money on things you didn’t intend to. Lay people are often ignorant of these traps and can be tricked without even knowing. Therefore, we would like to increase people’s awareness about typical marketing tricks, and thus be more rational as consumers.

Our project (https://www.facebook.com/bearationalcustomer/)

We aimed at promoting consumers to spend money rationally by revealing some marketing strategies used by franchises. To ensure the knowledge is expressed in an accessible and reader-friendly way, we framed the knowledge into short stories and made them into comics. In the comic, there are two main characters named Ben and Sally (figure 1). Ben is portrayed as silly, and easily convinced by others, and Sally is characterised as geeky and loquacious. Each of the stories typically describes how Ben spends money unnecessarily, and gets nagged by Sally. The speech given by Sally would explain what tricks marketers have used and how that affected Ben to spend the money. In the end, Sally would shout our slogan at Ben, that is, be a rational consumer. We intentionally avoided using any technical expressions so that the comics are fun and easily understandable, yet carrying knowledge and insights. We also intended to describe the scenarios that most of us may have encountered before, to help us recognise that you and I were probably just as silly as Ben. We believe our comics could help people in recognising common marketing traps, and be more conscious about what our real needs are. And therefore, to make people more rational about spending money. Furthermore, we also hope to interest others in studying about influence, and human irrationality further.

Our Cartoons

Characters:

Figure 1.

Below are some examples of our comics, and their underlying explanations. 

Figure 2.

See figure 2., the “Buy one get something free” technique is extremely widely-used. In fact, such marketing strategy has been called the “razor and blade model”, which underlie the grand profit made by the Gillet company. According to research, when something is sold at a reduced price (or free), the sales of its complementary goods go up, and this usually brings about better profit (McCarthy, 2011). The beauty of selling things for free is that it elicits a feeling, that is, it would never go wrong to take it, and if you don’t get it, you are at lost. This is called loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979), and this psychological construct has been exploited in many ways, such as the use of framing (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). Marketers can frame their speech to elicit loss aversion. For example: “Buy it or miss it forever!”

Figure 3. 

See figure 3., this is perhaps the case that many have encountered. But did you know that Amazon’s sale increased dramatically, just by offering people a month of free deliveries? When you fancy something on Amazon, having a couple of pounds’ delivery fee really keeps us from buying them. When the delivery is free, what’s there to stop us? We just cannot resist freebies. Various study found people give up valuable things just to get the free stuff. Even worse, we are too lazy to unsubscribe free delivery, which automatically leads to spending on Prime to keep the privilege. No wonder how Amazon has made their profit. 

Figure 4. 

See figure 4., did you ever wonder why, when the salesman shows you something you can hardly afford, before showing the one you really needed? The truth is, they never meant to sell you the expensive one, they are just showing you the prices as they increase the likelihood of you buying the cheaper ones. Studies have shown people estimate the price of things based on values they have previously encountered. And the numbers can be as arbitrary as your social security numbers. These irrelevant figures act as “anchors” in your mind, and significantly affects people’s estimated prices for subsequent products (Ariely, Loewenstein, & Prelec, 2003; Scott & Lizieri, 2012). This process is called arbitrary coherence. Therefore, if you are shown a more expensive good, the cheaper choices would seem less expensive. 

Figure 5. 

See figure 5., some businesses quite like holding contests and challenges, just to make people use their product. The event aims to familiarise people with the companies’ product, and this simply gets them loyal customers. In psychology, it is argued that your actions largely influence your attitudes. Though your initial incentive to participate in the event was the money or the good deals, nevertheless, your very actions would somehow convince you that you love the product. This is called the effect of Cognitive Dissonance, such that your attitude changes in concordance with your actions (Festinger, 1962). Indeed, why else would you spend so much effort writing the essay, just for losing the contest in the end?

Did you like our comics? There are more fun cartoons on our homepage, why not go and check it out? https://www.facebook.com/bearationalcustomer/

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